Remembering Identity, Identifying Memory

Instead of insisting on the conceptual tension and antagonism between diaspora and indigeneity, these examples suggest that the two concepts may be better con-ceived of as strategic positions (or positionings) that are moreover contingent on specific historical situations. Thus they are less useful as stable definitions of substantial entities but should rather be understood as‘categories of practice’

used to“make claims, to articulate projects, to formulate expectations, to mobi-lize energies, to appeal to loyalties.”³⁴More importantly, the acknowledgement of the inherent critical complicity or ‘intersectionality’ of the two concepts also challenges the interdisciplinary (critical and cultural) study of law, literature and human rights to become more attentive to the specific historical conditions and developments which have informed (and still inform) the production of diasporic and indigenous subjectivities to begin with. In other words, acknowl-edging the conceptual complicity between diaspora and indigeneity opens new venues for critically exploring the historical connection, convergence and

com- Hoxie,“Red Continent,”.

 Sophie McCall emphasizes the convergence even more:“Diasporic and Indigenous commun-ities share common experiences of loss, uprooting, and adaptation; they emphasize in a compa-rable manner the importance of maintaining the homeland and dreaming of one day‘returning’

to the homeland.”Sophie McCall,“Diaspora and Nation,”.

 Brubaker,“Diaspora,”.

plementarity of diasporic and indigenous practices of subject formation, as well as the practices of resistance to this formation: The diasporic and the indigenous subject are thus revealed as two closely related, even mutually dependent forms of post-colonial subjectivities who share the nation state as a central point of ref-erence, as Christine Kim and Sophie McCall argue:

[…] theories of diaspora and indigeneity, while often critical of the discourses associated with modern, industrialized nation-states, silently re[ly] on nation-based imaginings of col-lectivities. […] [D]iaspora and nation are interdependent and mutually constituting, just as indigeneity and nation are reciprocally contingent and responsive.³⁵

Nowhere are these interdependencies and reciprocities more articulate today and also more complex than in the contemporary negotiations and tensions be-tween national and international (civil and human) rights regimes and the sub-jectivities they project and proclaim. In a time when human rights“have become a major strategy for resisting public and private domination and exploitation”

and are seen as“central to a long history of rebellion, resistance, new articula-tions of injustice, and new understandings of freedom,”³⁶the diasporic subject, as well as its inverse mirror image, the indigenous subject, have become central concepts to critically question and undermine the nation-state’s conceptual mo-nopoly in regard to citizenship, legal personhood and the subject of (human and civil) rights.

Throughout the history of modern rights, literature has continuously reacted and responded most emphatically and poignantly to the alleged privilege of the state to define and project legal and political subjectivities in terms of their eli-gibility within the framework of civil society. My concluding remarks are thus dedicated to literature, more specifically to an understanding of literature within the larger context of human rights, cultural identity and the relation between di-aspora and indigenism as competing concepts of post-colonial subjectivities.

Most readers will understand Michael Ondaatje’s novelAnil’s Ghost (2000) as a diasporic text in more than one sense–on the one hand obviously because of its author’s biography, but on the other also because of the particular position of the novel’s central protagonist as a Sri Lanka immigrant to America, a position which is described early on in the narrative as a confusing mixture of familiarity and estrangement at Anil’s first return to her‘homeland’:

 Christine Kim, Sophie McCall,“Introduction,”inCultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Canada,ed. Christine Kim, Sophie McCall, Melina Baum Singer (Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier UP,):–,.

 Coombe,“Honing,”–.

The island no longer held her by her past […] she had now lived abroad long enough to interpret Sri Lanka with a long-distance gaze. But here it was a more complicated world morally. The streets were still streets, the citizens remained citizens. They shopped, changed jobs, laughed. Yet the darkest Greek tragedies were innocent compared with what was hap-pening here. Heads on stakes. Skeletons dug out of a cocoa pit in Matale. At university Anil had translated lines from Archilocus–In the hospitality of war we left them their dead to remember us by. But here there was no such gesture to the families of the dead, not even the information of who the enemy was.³⁷

The image of a civil society where all civility has fallen prey to the war–even the civility of war–is carefully constructed right at the beginning of the novel and mediated through the point of view of Anil, who works as a forensic for the UN to investigate human rights violations which had been perpetrated by the various fighting parties during the civil war in Sri Lanka– including the State itself.

The initial observation of the shopping, laughing citizens which contrasts sharp-ly with Anil’s knowledge about the atrocities and inhumanities of the civil war creates a cognitive dissonance which increases Anil’s sense of (inner) distance.

The image also stands at the beginning of the two major contrasting and conflict-ing movements or tendencies which dominate the various strands of the narra-tive. One trajectory clearly moves towards dissolution and absolute destruction and it ends in another image at the closing of the novel with the assassination of the head of state, President Katugala, by a suicide bomber, in a scene which realizes the devastating potential already alluded to in Anil’s first impressions.³⁸Here the public sphere of the civil state turns into the murderous space where a citizen kills another citizen by killing himself, a violent symbol of the utter self-destruction of civil society and its ethos of civility:

R—[the assassin] had been waiting for this day, when he was sure he would be able to get Katulaga on the street […] there was no way R—could have entered the presidential grounds [so he] had to approach him in a public place, with all the paraphernalia of dev-astation sewn onto himself. He was not just the weapon but the aimer of it. The bomb would destroy whoever he was facing. His own eyes and frame were the cross-hairs. […]

At four p.m. on National Heroes Day, more than fifty people were killed instantly, including the president. The cutting action of the explosion shredded Kataluga into pieces. […] The body, what remained of it, was not found for a long time. (AG 290–291, 292)

 Michael Ondaatje,Anil’s Ghost(London: Vintage: []):, emphasis in the original.

Further references to this novel as“AG”.

 The name of the president is fictional, the scene refers to the actual assassination of then President Premadasa in , cf. http://www.nytimes.com////world/suicide-bomb er-kills-president-of-sri-lanka.html; (acc.Jan).

The force of this devastating trajectory is historical in most fundamental ways and the scene, while alluding to a particular horrific event in the long history of civil war violence in Sri Lanka, nevertheless unfolds an almost uncanny famil-iarity for contemporary readers, less as a historical fiction than as a present day reality, a potential violence which afflicts the modern state, challenging its sov-ereignty, but most disturbingly, potentially eroding the foundations of the ethos of civility.

The most important and poignant aspect for Ondaatje, however, is that this destructive violence of history–the violence of the process of modernity– ob-literates and eradicates all other forms of human history by making humans dis-appear. The complete disappearance of humans, the radical effacement of their identity, their memory, their culture and all other traces of their existence is the central concern of the novel, and thus the second trajectory of the narrative is marked by an ethos of reconstruction, an ongoing act of resistance to annihila-tion, a consistent effort to retrieve and revive an identity that is not merely his-torical but aligned with lived memory. This effort obviously drives Anil’s and her collaborators’attempts to recover the identity of the unknown victim, called ‘Sai-lor’whose skeleton they saved from a burial ground. With the help of an artist, Ananda, they attempt to reconstruct Sailor’s face in a process of‘head composi-tion’, carefully reconstructing the layers of facial muscles to bring out the resem-blance that would allow living people to recognize and remember the unknown dead. Even though this forensic reconstruction does not bring about the desired identification– “it was unlikely that identification would occur. There had been so many disappearances” –the figure of Ananda, who calls himself an artificer, is at the center of the closing scene of the novel which must be read as a delib-erate contrast to the preceding assassination scene, indeed the two passages form the two alternative endings of the narrative. The last part is titled “Dis-tance”which resonates with and at the same time revises Anil’s“long-distance gaze”at the beginning of the novel. The closing act of reconstruction takes place in a sacred space, close to the famous Buduruvagala rock statues, a“region of desperate farming” where the “stone bodies rising out of the earth […] often were the only human aspect a farmer would witness in his landscape during the day. They brought permanence to brief lives.” (AG 295) The sanctity and the permanence of the site, however, have been violated and disturbed, the Bud-dha figure destroyed:“this was the place where trucks came to burn and hide victims who had been picked up. These were the fields where Buddhism and its values met the harsh political events of the twentieth century.”(AG 296)

Ananda’s reconstructive task is two-fold; he has been asked“to attempt a reconstruction of the [original] Buddha statue,”but he also has been asked to perform an ancient ritual of dedicating a new statue which is being built

simul-taneously“to replace the destroyed god.”This ritual, known as the Nêtra Man-gala ceremony, is meant to conclude and at the same time to transform the stat-ue into the figure of the Buddha by painting the god’s eyes. This is being done by looking into a mirror at the face of the statue while painting the eyes:“The boy held up the metal mirror so that it reflected the blank stare of the statue. The eyes unformed, unable to see. And until he had eyes–always the last thing painted or sculpted–he was no Buddha.”(AG 302) Both acts of reconstruction are cru-cial, they do not compete with but rather complete each other. The reconstruc-tion of the original statue which Ananda finally achieves, recovers the past of a culture in form of a face which reflects and documents the violence of human war and conflict in its scarred and battered look:“Up close the face looked quilted. They had planned to homogenize the stone […] but […] Ananda decided to leave it as it was. He worked instead on the composure and the qual-ities of the face. […] Now sunlight hit the seams of its face, as if it were sewn roughly together. He wouldn’t hide that […] torn look in its great acceptance.”

(AG 298, 300)

The final eye ceremony in comparison is in a sense also about the recovery of an identity, albeit through the re-enactment of a ritual and the renewal of faith which for Ananda includes the memory of his adducted disappeared wife, anoth-er victim of the civil war. While painting the eye of the statue the artificanoth-er regains for a moment a fuller, more integrated form of vision:

And now with human sight he was seeing all the fibres of natural history around him. He could witness the smallest approach of a bird every flick of its wing. […] Ananda briefly saw this angle of the world. There was a seduction for him there. The eyes he had cut with his father’s chisel showed him this. The birds dove towards gaps within the trees! […] The tini-est of hearts in them beating exhausted and fast, the way Sirissa had died in the story he invented for her in the vacuum of her disappearance. A small brave heart. In the heights she loved and the dark she feared.

He felt the boy’s concerned hand on his. This sweet touch from the world. (AG 303) It is significant to note that the novel starts out with a diasporic perspective but ends with a form of vision that is deeply informed by a traditional‘indigenous’

ritual practice and the re-enactment of faith. These two forms do not in any way cancel each other out; Anil’s and Ananda’s attempts in reconstructing identity are at the same time indebted to a historical forensics as they are informed by acts of faith in the transformative potential of justice.